I’m trying to imagine what it would have been like if the HP movies split off and JK just did nothing for a decade and the story ended without knowing if they would ever be finished, and I’m pretty sure I would have gone full Mad King.
I feel like he just didn't want to end the books with the show still airing, and now that the show will be done in like a month he'll put out books quicker Also someday I'll finally re-finish the first book and move on to the second
Yeah I'm at this point as well. I was pretty mad once it became clear that the show would end before even the sixth book was out, but I've moved on and gotten to the point where, like I said earlier, as long as the show ends strongly whatever happens with the books happens.
Makes you wonder how weird it would be that if HBO waited until he was done to do a better job of being consistent and aligned with them, the vast majority of the actors would be different now. I know I wouldn't know at the time, but imagining them as other people now is strange.
GRRM has written like dozens of blog posts in the past 10 years about how he's been trying and failing to continue writing the main series books, i wouldn't count on it coming out within 2 years. any speedup in his writing will be from not having to do show stuff anymore, not from any choice he consciously made
A part of me wishes that the show hadn't been made until after the books were done. It's such a strange thing, to adapt something that isn't finished. Like, they had to know they would outpace him, even if the sixth book had come out during the show's run there's no way the seventh would have as well. I can't think of any other time this has been done before.
i remember when ppl genuinely thought GRRM wouldn't let the show outpace the books. how naive we were lol
idec about the books at this point. i would have to reread 4 & 5 at LEAST to feel like i was jumping back in with that narrative untangled from the show's in my mind and there's no way i'm doing that
I read Neil Gaiman's article titled something like 'George R.R. Martin Is Not Your Bitch' from a couple years ago about fans not being owed anything by authors, and I see where it is coming from, but I also think it is a dick move not to just finish the damn books.
If he wrote the books on a timeline similar to most other authors there was no reason be couldn't have had them both done before the show caught up.
I’ve been trying to think of any similar situations to this and I just can’t. I mean I guess there are things where they adapt like one story from a series that just goes on and on, but that’s not really the same thing. This should in theory be one complete work, and what made it so incredibly famous may also be its ultimate undoing? That has to be unique.
Well, the show started the same year that the fifth book came out. The run of the show was 8 years. So if he took four years per book he could have had them both out at the same time as the show's ending. Although to be fair these books are long as hell and super complicated. He has to make sure he doesn't mess things up or contradict himself. And in order to do that he has to square whatever he's writing now with over 5000 pages of material lol. That's going to draw out the process bit.
I'm sure you're not meaning to be mean or unreasonable, but if the man has writer's block and/or exhaustion, what else can you hope for? A rushed shitty book? It sucks but it is what it is. It's like when a video game gets delayed. It's usually better since it gives it more time to be developed and iron out any wrinkles than rushing it to market and everyone hating it.
if the Kingkiller show/movie stops being passed around and starts existing, that'll be adapted before book three comes out pretty realistically
The Harry Potter movies started before the books were done, the first movie came out a year after Goblet of Fire. JKR only had three more books to write though, those books aren't as complicated as these ones, and they weren't making a movie a year. So JKR was writing at a faster pace than GRRM and there was no danger of the movie outpacing the books. I guess there could have been if she had had writer's block at some point, but the longest time between any of those books was the three years between Goblet and Phoenix, so it wasn't a problem.
If that's how long it takes, that's how long it takes. In the long run, all that will matter is what is in the books, not how long it took him to write them. Writer's block is one thing, and if he has that, that sucks and I feel bad for him. I don't buy the complexity thing though - there are lots of very complex books that don't take the author the better part of a decade to write. I don't think anyone was expecting him to do that, I was just pointing out that the timeline would not have been *that* ridiculous for a lot of other working authors.
The book has definitely turned into a clusterfuck of different story threads that are hard to resolve easily. He did so much world building that characters that had to get from point a to point b suddenly had like a dozen other points to get to first. I think the difficulty with that combined with the pressure probably just had him get sick of it and he took some long breaks. It seems like TWOIAF and Fire and Blood got his juices flowing again though.
All kidding aside, if I were him I probably would have hired someone else to either ghost-write it for me or legit just write write it for me .
I lived in the town where GRRM grew up for four years, I was always hoping he'd like come to see friends/family and I'd randomly run in to him somewhere but alas it never happened.
It's funny to me that a chief complaint amongst people who read the books first is that the show is too simplistic and cuts corners, whereas people who watched the show first and then went to the books tend to find them unbearably dense and a slog to get through. I think I fall somewhere in the middle. Books 1 and 2 are long, but manageable. Once you get into 3 and 4, you sort of just stop reading during the middle of some chapters and ask yourself, "What the fuck are we even doing right now?" As much as I want to see how GRRM brings it all together, I'm not totally sure I have the willpower to reread the books in preparation.